Mindful U at Naropa University
Thoughts and Instruction on Mindfulness in Higher Education
We found 10 episodes of Mindful U at Naropa University with the tag “meditation”.
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96. Barbara Bash: Heaven, Earth and Humanity—What Calligraphy Can Teach Us About Each Moment
May 10th, 2023 | 58 mins 40 secs
art, big brush stroke, buddhist studies, calligraphy, contemplative art, integration, meditation, naropa, naropa university
We are happy to have Spring 2023 Lenz Distinguished Lecturer Barbara Bash join us to discuss her creative journey as a calligraphic artist. In this episode, she discusses everything from Western calligraphy's precision to Big Brushstroke calligraphy's spontaneity and what unites them. She also discusses the three primary principles of contemplative art: Heaven, Earth, and Humanity and how these become gateways that attune you to the aliveness of the moment. After the episode, find more on BarbaraBash.com.
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95. Valeria McCarroll, PhD: Somadelics, Pursuing Life with Psychedelic Support & Intentional Integration
February 27th, 2023 | 49 mins 5 secs
buddhist studies, integration, meditation, naropa, naropa university, phenomena, psychedelic assisted therapy, psychedelic medicine, psychedelics, somatic psychology, therapy, transpersonal psychology, trauma healing
Valeria McCarroll, PhD, joins us to discuss Somadelics, Pursuing Life with Psychedelic Support & Intentional Integration in this thought-provoking episode. Also discussed is being in 'right relationship' with the medicine, trauma responses, honoring the medicine's lineage, and transformational justice. After the episode, find more on ValeriaMcCarroll.com and Somadelics.com.
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78. Charles Eisenstein: The Origin of Wrongness
February 17th, 2020 | 45 mins 53 secs
buddhism, buddhist inspired, charles eisenstein, david devine, education, good intention, higher education, inner self, inner work, inspiration, intention, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, origin of wrongness, reflection, self development, university, war, wrongness
"I read very widely and was trying to put the pieces together to understand this lifelong question that I had carried. What is the origin of the wrongness in the world, which is presented to us as a series of fragmented isolated atrocities and injustices and horrors -- without any synthesizing narrative that explains why the world is the way that it is? And I really wanted to understand so that I wouldn't be part of maintaining the status quo through pursuing insufficiently deep solutions that may be actually part of the problem. I think a lot of our solutions are part of the problem -- or you could even say our solution templates -- I mean one of them is the war on evil. So, I wanted to -- to get really deep and eventually I came to understand that all of the crises and horrors that we see in the world are an outgrowth of the mythology of civilization. The story of separation is what I call it, which basically says it answers the most fundamental questions that human beings ask. Who are you? Who am I? What is important? How is life to be lived? What is real? What is possible? How does the world work? And our culture answers that in a certain way. And other cultures have answered it different ways."
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77. Charlotte Rotterdam: Finding Courage in Contemplative Education
February 17th, 2020 | 47 mins 38 secs
charlotte rotterdam, college, contemplative, contemplative education, courage, david devine, education, higher education, meditation, mindful, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, university
"Absolutely. You know we might have an idea about something, but then when you begin to express it from a creative place it's almost like you have to feel into it. If I want to write a poem about sadness it's not just about my ideas about sadness. At some point as I'm writing I need to stop and feel into what does sadness feel like? And then I might even think about a very specific situation in my life that brings up sadness. And then what arises from that place as a poem is coming from a non-conceptual place. Non-conceptual knowing and yet I've expressed something and I might even express it in words like with a poem. So, what we're trying to do in contemplative education is to bring both of those together. So, it's not in spite of conceptual knowing -- concepts are great, thinking is great -- but that there are other ways of knowing that are equally important and maybe if we bring them all together then there's a richness of knowing that begins to emerge."
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70. Alicia Patterson: Deep Wisdom & Healing of the Pelvic Bowl
April 22nd, 2019 | 49 mins 30 secs
alicia patterson, college, david devine, education, healing, health, higher education, meditation, mindful, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, pelvic, pelvic bowl, pelvic floor, pelvic wisdom, psychology, somatic, somatic therapy, therapy, university, wisdom, women, womens health
"The pelvic floor muscle tissues are connected very intricately and beautifully, and I feel like it can be complex in some ways to the abdominal muscles. And I think of the pelvic floor as the foundation of a building, it's like the ground level of the body. If the foundation of a building is off or suffering or it's not right, the whole rest of the building is off. So, that's my best metaphor is that the pelvic floor is our foundation. It's so connected to our legs and our feet and the way that we walk and move and dance through the world. And it supports everything above it. So, the reproductive organs, the digestive system, all the organs, the heart, the voice, the throat, and the brain are supported by the pelvic floor. And I've had huge changes in my digestion and rewiring of my nervous system and real cognitive and mood balances from working with my pelvic floor that before, I was trying a million different things to feel better. For me, the pelvic floor is like the Holy Grail."
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68. Venerable Pannavati: Hearing the Cries of the World & Responding with Compassion
April 8th, 2019 | 53 mins 48 secs
awareness, buddhism, care, compassion, david devine, devine, fierce compassion, higher education, love, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, practice, university, venerable pannavati
"Meditation is so important—particularly training and concentration. How to steady and fix the mind until conceptual thoughts fall away. We live so much in our conceptualizing nature that we can't imagine life without that. But when you start doing this practice, you find out that you can conceptualize, and you cannot. So, learning how to drop into that stillness, as the Buddha calls it, until you come to the absolute stilling of all thought. We think well then, there's nothing. Yes, there is something beyond that, you could never see it before because you were caught in the cycle of conceptualizing. But the other side that the Buddha calls meditation—a pleasant, abiding here and now, touching kind of contentment and peace that the world didn't give you. So, the world can't take it away. But what he called practice was something entirely different. We just need to do more practice, and the practice is not to sit on the pillow. Sitting on a pillow is sitting on a pillow. But to practice is how we handle ourselves in every moment of our waking day—when one is accosting you, taking what is yours and what is criticizing you."
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67. Nashalla Nyinda: Tibetan & Asian Medicine in Relationship with Western Biomedicine
April 1st, 2019 | 49 mins 45 secs
acu pressure, asian medicine, ayurvedic, college, herbalism, higher education, medicine, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, nashalla nyinda, tibetan medicine, university, western medicine
"It's said in Tibetan medicine that you have to have all five elements plus karma in order to be incarnated at all. So, even to obtain the precious human body you have to have all five elements in karma. So you're going to choose certain parents and situations. They're going to give you some genetic factors which are going to influence your inner elements and then also you're going to have the diet and the behavior that your mother has during your pregnancy is going to influence it. The outer environment is going to influence it and then very early on in life -- your life situations are also going to influence it. So, family systems, psychology, all of that has an impact on the choices we make. So, somebody could be inherently one type of being and perhaps their family system either didn't recognize or support that and so they made a choice in order to compensate on a psychological level."
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64. Holistic Life Foundation: A Teacher's Approach to Mindfulness in Baltimore Public Schools
March 11th, 2019 | 43 mins 36 secs
baltimore, contemplative, higher education, holistic life foundation, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, practice, public schools, teachers
"You know, we're doing this job dealing with people's problems and not necessarily giving them advice, but just allowing them to tap into their own thoughts and weigh out their own options to create decisions. The more you hold on—you attach yourself to an outcome, then that becomes stressful and then it's not genuine anymore. It's also stressful on the other end of the person that is dealing with the actual problem. So just knowing that you may not see the results—but one thing I have noticed is the maturity that came from my students that I've interacted with—the same situation, but a different outcome of the consequence whenever you're redirected."
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63. Holistic Life Foundation: A Principal's Insight to Mindfulness Programs in Baltimore Public Schools
March 4th, 2019 | 44 mins 16 secs
baltimore, baltimore schools, city public schools, education, fort worthington elementary school, holistic life foundation, meditation, mindfulness, monique debi, naropa university, patterson high school, principals, school, vance benton, yoga
"Anything dealing with meditation or anything dealing with children's emotional growth is difficult to quantify. And it's difficult to put a price on it. So, it's difficult for schools, principals in particular to bring programs when you gotta pay some people to do some things inside of a school. So, meditation and things of that nature unfortunately will be put on the backburner. And a lot of people's levels of urgency tend be well, low on that on that scale. Because a lot of people just aren't into it themselves. And unfortunately, can't see a broader picture, outside of what's the immediate gratification."
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38. Nataraja Kallio & Ben Williams: Reining in the Wild Mind - Yoga Traditions and Studies
September 10th, 2018 | 37 mins 8 secs
hatha yoga, meditation, yoga teacher training
It is important to cultivate discernment in the sense of a historical awareness: the ability to discern many different streams in yogic traditions, and understand their fundamental orientations, outlooks, and practices. This means not letting these different streams all get mixed up into a very vague notion of yoga, but actually appreciating the depth and integrity of each. And thus when we draw from each lineage, we gain greater access to its transformational power. I think that discernment is something that is missing in the broader world of modern postural yoga.